‘Jim Lane is mine!’
Quantrill stood up in the stirrups, the silvery light of the moon gleaming off the drawn saber in his right hand. The rest of the men were spread along the flank of the hill overlooking Lawrence, each with a weapon ready. Some favored a saber like their colonel, but most carried a pistol.
‘If any of you have scores to settle, then so be it! But Lane is mine and I will shoot down any man who kills him for me! That is all. No quarter... no quarter to any man there!! Ride fast and shoot true! Now go!!!’
There was a roar like distant thunder as the guerrillas saw the signal of the cutting blade and heard the command to attack.
Jed and Whitey were alongside each other in the centre of the column, with Frank James next in line and then Cole Younger, close to Quantrill. They began at a fast trot, sweeping down the gentle slope, a cloud of dust swirling about them and hiding their numbers.
Although they had been told to keep silence for as long as possible, there were close to five hundred men in that bloody wave of attackers, all with their nerves stretched taut with the excitement. Most with cocked pistols in their hands.
It was not surprising then that they had covered less than half of the distance towards the lights of the township before a finger slipped on a trigger and the first shot heralding the onslaught rang out.
Followed by a volley of shots as some of the younger and more excitable boys also fired off at the houses, despite the absurd range. Jed was close enough to Quantrill to hear him call out in anger to Cole Younger.
‘Blast them! If I find who shot first I will have him skinned alive!’
But it was too late for any regrets.
Too late for anything as the horses began to stretch out to a full gallop, the earth vibrating under the charge, every man beginning to yell with the excitement that coursed through the blood. Whooping and grinning at his neighbor with idiot pleasure. Herne felt the fire race through his body and yelled with the Test, waving the Tranter in his hand, barely restraining himself from shooting the pistol off wildly.
The moon hung overhead, its silver edges tinged with yellow, throwing the land into sharp relief. Over to the right Jed saw that some of the riders were having trouble with their horses, the animals taking control. There was a scream and one man went down, his cry almost drowning the sharp snap of his horse’s leg breaking. He brought down a half dozen more riders, the bodies tumbling and rolling among the flailing hooves.
But there was no time to check to help a fallen man. All the Raiders were galloping on hell for leather, spurring furiously so that their animal’s flanks ran with blood, its crimson turned stark black in the moonlight.
Then, suddenly, they were in among the first of the buildings, splitting off into smaller groups, the darkness broken by the flash of gunfire, clouds of powder-smoke beginning to drift about them.
From that moment on Jed Herne lost touch with his comrades, and the night and early morning became a series of frantic scenes, punctuated by screams and smoke and bloody death.
Early on he’d charged straight through Lawrence, firing at any man who showed himself, only checking his horse when the clean hills of the prairie appeared in front of him, with no more buildings. As he reined in he looked back at Lawrence, hearing the bedlam of screams and cries, and the crackle of hand-guns. If their information had been correct, then there, would be very few men left in the town and those that were there would have little connection with the Jayhawkers. It shouldn’t prove that difficult for Quantrill to have his vengeance on Jim Lane and also seize the Union gold that was supposed to be stored in the town.
Away to his right he caught a glimpse of a figure on a large farm horse, kicking it furiously in the ribs as he urged it on up the sloping hill away from Lawrence. Herne guessed that it must be someone who’d heard the first sounds of the attack and was grabbing a desperate chance to make it to safety, taking the first animal he could. It even occurred to Jed that it could be Jim Lane himself, and he turned his own mount ready to give chase,
‘Hold there!’
‘What?’
‘Jed, isn’t it?’
It was Quantrill himself, his hat blown from his head, his face already darkened by powder smoke, saber still waving in his right hand.
‘There—’ began Jed, starting to point towards the fleeing man with his Tranter, but Quantrill interrupted him with a shout
‘Back into the town, Jed, and pick off all you see. We’ll make these bastards pay our price for what they have done.’
‘But, colonel. There goes—’
The sleepy eyes were full open, a ring of white clearly visible around the dark pupil.
‘I don’t give a damn for one poor farmer. Let the son of a bitch go, Jed. We have bigger and fatter fish to catch and cook.’
‘It might be Lane, colonel,’ shouted Herne, but Quantrill was already spurring away back towards the town, where the first flickering light of a fire was showing red and mean and hungry.
Jed shrugged his broad shoulders and began to follow the colonel, letting the man, whoever he was, escape,
It wasn’t until two hours later, when the first bloody confusion had begun to abate, that Quantrill found out who the man on the ambling farm-horse had been. And he threw his sword to the dirt in blind rage when he was told that it had, indeed, been Jim Lane.
Woken by those first shouts and shots, his nerves always ready for an attack, Lane had leaped from a window of his house and taken the first mount he could find, kicking it on away from his house and family, wearing only his underclothes.
But it was a hollow victory for the Jayhawkers leader, as the guerrillas burned his house to the ground and his deserted wife and children paid an awful price for his escape.
The lust for revenge and killing grew amid the smoke and fire. It was quickly obvious to Jed that Quantrill’s story of the treasure of the Union Army being hidden in Lawrence was simply a lie to persuade his men to follow him on the raid. And discovering there was precious little gold or silver, the Raiders began a riot of savagery that had no equal during that long War.
There had been lists made of the Jayhawkers leaders, but in the first hour or so they were completely forgotten, and any man found alive was swiftly butchered. Fathers were dragged from their homes and shot to pieces under a hail of pistol fire, while wives and children looked on helpless.
But that was only the beginning.
The beginning of a night that would live forever in the memory of Jedediah Herne and would cause the name of Quantrill and his Raiders to be scorned forever in the minds of all right-thinking people.
And it was only just beginning.
Jed saw the first of the looters breaking in through the window of one of the stores. He cantered past, glancing up at the second floor curtains, looking for the fluttering that would reveal someone hiding behind them ready to snipe at the attackers.
The leader of the looters was the man named Red, and he was stuffing money into the pockets of his long coat, laughing and calling out to the others. A bottle of whiskey stood by his feet, its neck broken off.
The store was on fire, with flames already licking up at the shingled roof. An elderly woman came staggering out of the broken door, her night-clothes streaming smoke behind her. She tried to claw at Red, either for help or out of hatred, but it made no difference. Without stopping pushing banknotes into his pocket he shoved her contemptuously in the chest with the flat of his other hand, back into the fire. Herne could hear her screaming as her hair flared into a torch of flames’ When she made a last, desperate attempt for life, Red drew his pistol and shot her through the chest, the impact of the thirty-six caliber bullet kicking her back into the blazing building.
She never came out again.
With the looting came the drinking.
And with the drinking, the killings grew worse.
Not just men.
Women and children.
Anyone.
Herne saw a woman running towards him, arms stretched out in a gesture of appeal. Wide-set brown eyes, opened so far that it seemed impossible for them to remain in their sockets.: The hem of her dress was burning, and her bare feet were blistered and scorched.
It was odd how images locked themselves into his memory.
The bare feet. The brown eyes. A small scar on the woman’s right cheek. Her hand reaching up to where he sat his horse, fingers brushing his leg, the mouth open to plead for help.
Then her body flying backwards as if it had been tugged on invisible strings, blood jetting from her throat where the bullet had taken her. Jed looked round and saw Frank James grinning at him, waving a smoking pistol
‘Just got her in timer Frank had yelled. ‘She’d have killed you.’
Then he vanished again, while Jed thought of the look in the eyes, and the cry for aid that was never uttered.
Carnage and horror.
Herne felt a figure rushing towards him, and a hand tugged at his bridle. Having just cut down a man brandishing a sickle at him, Jed was ready for the new attack. He lashed out with his boot, feeling the toe thud home twice, but there was still the grip on the reins.
The clouds of smoke from the guns had been overshadowed by the choking fumes from the burning buildings, as the whole town was put to the torch, covering the moon and reducing vision to a few feet.
A third time he kicked out, seeing the glint of a knife aimed at him. Letting the saber hang from the cross-belt he wore, Jed fumbled for the Tranter.
But the cocking lever caught on the edge of the holster and he dropped the gun in the dirt.
‘Bastard!’ screamed a voice at him, high-pitched with the fear and tension of the fight. Parrying the knife with his foot, Jed managed to draw the familiar Navy Colt from the belt and blasted off three shots at his unseen assailant. Feeling the hand disappear from the bridle.
Right behind him there was a burst of fire from a blazing house, momentarily illuminating the street. Herne glanced down to make sure his assailant was no longer a threat,
Not with half his head blown away he wasn’t,
He was a boy of about twelve years old.
‘Jed! Help!’
It was Whitey’s voice. Urgent.
Herne stood in his stirrups, looking round the milling town, jerking the reins as a dog ran by, its entrails dragging in the dust. Then he saw Whitey, half out of the saddle, being attacked by a half dozen women and old men, using pans and lengths of wood to beat him down.
‘Hey!’ yelled Jed, spurring forwards, whirling the heavy cavalry saber round his shoulders, his horse, knocking most of Whitey’s enemies away from him.
A blood-dulled butcher’s knife was waved at him and he cut down at the face behind it, his own keen blade slicing through the old man’s nose, splitting his wire-framed spectacles into neat halves, the blood spurting up and dappling his trousers and arm.
There were other memories.
An elderly man with a neat line of bullet holes stitched across his body, wandering among the shambles singing We Will Gather At The River in a quavering monotone.
A Union soldier in uniform trousers, crawling along the burning boardwalk with a saber stuck through his back, wedged in his spine, with the point tearing a furrow of splinters from the timbers as it protruded out of the dying man’s belly.
Herne chasing a man round the back of a barn having seen him shoot down one of the Raiders from a first-floor window. Killing him with one shot in the back of the head from the Colt, and dismounting for a moment to reload the warm gun. Seeing into a barn where there was a group of the Confederate irregulars gathered round something in the straw. Curiosity on Herne’s part as he walked in, greeted with a grin by the others. Seeing what was happening and barely resisting the temptation to gun them down.
A woman spread-eagled in the dirt, blood around her thighs showing how she’d died, the hilt of a Reb bayonet still visible among the gobbets of wet crimson. And her daughter still alive, hands pinned to the floor with other knives while Quantrill’s men took their pleasure of her. The man on top of her, spending his lust in her, with the pale moons of his buttocks thrusting obscenely in the light from the fires was Red.
And the child could not have been more than eleven.
It was that moment that finally restored Herne to his senses.
Walking slowly out to his horse, seeing a weeping woman kneeling in trampled and bloodied earth, her arms round two more young children, trying to protect them from the ravaging madmen who were destroying the town of Lawrence to satisfy one mil’s whim for revenge.
There was a deep cut across the woman’s face, peeling back her lips showing the whiteness of broken teeth. The eyes that turned to Jed Herne were quite insane and he pulled out his pistol and shot her through the head, taking away her crazed pain.
And the children she had been trying to protect?
They felt nothing.
They were both already dead.
He reached Whitey Coburn, standing quietly by a burning barn, slaking his thirst from his water bottle. The white hair of the albino was stained with smoke and ashes, and splattered with fresh blood.
He looked up as Jed approached him and managed a slow grin. A tired grin.
‘Jesus, Jedediah. I was beginning to think that you’d gone forever.’
‘No. I guess not.’
‘Thanks for savin’ me from those women, Jed. I sure appreciate that.’
It was close to dawn, and the sky was lightening, though a huge pillar of smoke rose towering above them like a big black cloud hanging over the smoldering remains of the town, the air heavy with the stench of burning human flesh from some of the one hundred and forty-two men, women and children that Quantrill and his Raiders had butchered during the four hours of the raid.
‘Whitey?’
‘Yeah, brother Jedediah?’
‘I’m for movin’ on.’
Coburn sniffed, wiping his sleeve across his mouth, looking at the grime and sweat on his coat. Staring around at the desolation that had been a thriving settlement of two hundred souls when the sun had set the previous night
‘We didn’t get nothin’ out of it, Jed. Not a damned thing.’
‘Maybe a little older, Isaiah.’
‘Sure. Been bad doin’ here. Not what I looked for at all.’
Herne nodded. ‘Me neither. I don’t take to murder and burnin’ folks. Not even if they helped the Jayhawkers and tried to lynch Quantrill.’
‘Probably had it comin’,’ commented Whitey, sourly,
‘You comin’, then?’
‘I guess.’
For a long moment they looked at each other, the bitter smoke shrouding them from the rest of the town, hearing the occasional shot or scream, still lingering over die desolate ruins.
Herne coughed. ‘Yeah, why not? Come on, Whitey. Let’s go get us some clean air.’
Together they rode out of Lawrence, heading south and west, put of the War.
It was the middle of that afternoon before the pillar of black smoke finally vanished from their sight